Histamine, Anxiety, and CBD

We went through about a dozen NIH studies on anti-anxiety medications...anxiolytics as they're called.

Call them what you will as long as they work and we're not taking on a major addiction!

Towards the end of a pretty comprehensive overview of anti-anxiety meds, there was a 1-2 sentence blurb that caught our attention towards the very bottom of the list of meds.

The article first went through:

Benzodiazepines (the next opioid addiction)

SSRI's (serotonin boosters with a host of issues)

Triciclates (old serotonin boosters out of favor due to negatives)

BuSpar

And then there it was….hydroxyzine.

Hmmm.

It's a very old medication with very little side effects.

Since this is personal for us (2017 was a year of intense, rolling anxiety due to perimenopause), we like to turn over every stone.

The more we researched hydroxyzine for anxiety, the more curious we were.

It primarily acted on the histamine receptors, H1 as they're called.

Yet, its effectiveness rivaled benzo's for anxiety!

We knew that there was a tie between histamine release and anxiety...especially for the 40-60% of the population that has histamine issues but this was shocking.

What gives??

Why are we prescribing billions of dollars in SSRI's and benzos with incredibly significant knock on effects (see the article on anxiety meds versus CBD for the full scoop), when a simple and effective histamine med has been around for decades?

Our jaded side can answer that question but more importantly, just how deep is the underlying connection between histamine and anxiety?

Now, that's a question we want to get to the bottom of.

Let's go there now!

We'll cover these topics:

A quick look at histamine's function

Histamine and GABA

Histamine and Glutamate

How histamine affects anxiety

How CBD affects histamine

The best CBD for histamine and anxiety

What dose for histamine and anxiety

Let's get started.

First...what is histamine (besides the thing that is "anti" in antihistamine!)?

A quick look at histamine's function

Most of us know histamine for its over-active reaction to pollen, pet dander, and an assorted list of allergens.

Yes, it's in charge of the allergic response we have to many substances (increasingly by the way) but it does so much more.

Histamine is also a powerful neurotransmitter in the brain!

Let's quickly look at both aspects since it will all figure into our discussion of anxiety and CBD.

First, Histamine as an Allergic and Inflammatory agent

This is how most of know histamine (unfortunately)

It's part of our immune response and its role is straight forward.

Upon detection of foreign entities, get them out quickly!

The result is redness, swelling, itching, sneezing, coughing, and general constriction everywhere.

Again, get an allergen out fast.

Histamine is generally released from Mast Cells located throughout the body.

The name comes from a german word meaning "fattening" since they're jam-packed with histamine ready to be released.

CB2 has been shown to play a role in allergic inflammatory responses, being expressed by many immunologic cells including eosinophils, neutrophils and mast cells.

CB2 stands for cannabinoid receptors found throughout the immune system.

To put a point to it…

As a modulator of many immune and inflammatory responses, the ESS could potentially be harnessed for use in the management of a variety of disease processes including wound healing, acute and chronic inflammatory disorders, and cancer.

Let's look at CBD specifically.

A quick recap since we now see the connection between histamine release and anxiety.

First, most of the research is on CBD and "allergies" which is fine since that's just the end result of histamine release.

Let's start with allergic airway diseases (asthma, etc).

In one study:

CBD treatment decreased the inflammatory and remodelling processes in the model of allergic asthma.

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